Saturday, September 13, 2014

Chester Gould and Joseph Smith

On October 4, 1931, Dick Tracy (far left) burst on the scene in a comic
strip in the Detroit Mirror (Chicago
Tribune New York News Syndicate), the creation of 30-year-old, Oklahoma-born
comic artist Chester Gould (near left). By 1934, Dick Tracy was on radio over
NBC and later CBS and ABC stations. By 1946, the 2-Way Wrist Radio, worn as a
wristwatch by Tracy and members of the police force, became one of the strip’s
most immediately recognizable icons. This was 16 years before the first commercialized Mobile Telephone
Service, and some 35 years before the Radio Common Carrier (RCC) service was
introduced, and forty years before the first truly mobile cell phones of the 1970s,
when the first hand-held cell phone was
demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing around
4.4 pounds. In 1983, the
DynaTAC 8000x was the first to be commercially available. Interestingly
enough, in 2011, Hewlett-Packard delivered to the U.S. Army, 80 years after
Dick Tracy, a working prototype of what they’re calling a “Dick Tracy
wristwatch” — a lightweight, wearable device that soldiers in the field can use
to view digital maps and other data on a flexible plastic screen that won’t
shatter or crack like glass. Two years later, Apple began experimenting with
smartwatches made out of curved glass.

Left: The RCC Radio
Telephone; Center: The first cellular phone introduced in 1973 (DynaTAC8000X);
Right: The first pocket cell phone introduced in Japan in 1997-2003. Of course, in today's day and age of
computers, cell phones and video recorders, few remember Dick Tracy, but back
in the day, for those of us who grew up with the original Plainclothes, police
detective Tracy, he had the same electronics that are available today beginning
with his famous two-way wrist radio, which we thought at the time was impossible.

Once TV
came out, Tracy’s watch was upgraded to a 2-Way TV Watch—something all of us
thought was definitely impossible!

The original 2-Way Radio
became a 3-Way TV in 1964 So what does Dick Tracy have to do with the Book of Mormon and Joseph
Smith? First of all, one of the factors we need to consider is how common so
many past inventions appear to us today. There are few things anyone can
conceive in theory today that would surprise most of us. We have lived with
Star Trek since 1966, beginning only 20 years after Dick Tracy’s 2-Way Wrist
Radio. Those in their 50s today have grown up with “personal communicators”
(cell phones), “hypospray” injections (subcutaneous jet injection), “phasers
set on stun” (stun guns called tasers), “universal translators” (voice
recognition), “VISOR” (bionic eyes), ”Telepresence communication” (video
conferencing), “Tricorder” (NASA’s
LOCAD), “hand held medical instruments” (hand-held nuclear magnetic resonance
imaging), and “transparent aluminum” (ALON, aluminum oxynitride). Since 1969
man has walked on the moon. Movies show us a future of previously unbelievable
ideas that are now pretty common in thought. So most of us today do not think to deeply over ideas that would have
shocked our grandparents and great grandparents. In a word, we take them for
granted. But when you look at certain things that some claim are fiction but
others know to be reality, some items are truly remarkable. Take Joseph Smith’s translation of the Liahona “compass” found by Lehi before he and his family begin the
second phase of their journey in the wilderness (1 Nephi 16:10), in which he
described a small, compact hand-held compass 56 years before one was invented;
a portable unit that had texting ability (from the Lord to man [1 Nephi 16:26-30]),
163 years before the first texting was ever conceived, and 166 years before
Vice President Al Gore sent a text to launch the service in 1995. The Liahona
also had GPS capability (showing where they were and where they were headed [1
Nephi 16:10]). This was 66 years before Marconi invented wireless telegraphy,
78 to 81 years before “radio” came into being, and 129 years before Eisenhower
commissioned a GPS system to be developed and 166 years before it became fully
operational in 1995.

The Liahona was truly a remarkable invention for man to consider in 1829
when Joseph Smith described its use. Where would a 24-yer old uneducated young
farm boy, who had never heard of a car, airplane, telephone, radio, or other
type of objects have come up with such future technology that was more than a
century away from existence in his day. In fact, a partial list of inventions
after Joseph Smith’s time have been: photography, telegraph, sewing
machine, elevator, dishwasher,
dynamite, typewriter, automobile, phonograph, light bulb, airplane,
radio and television, washing machine, bicycle, moving pictures, toilet paper,
radar, zipper, helicopter, brazier
(bra), pop-up toaster, BandAid, frozen food, fiber
optics, air conditioning, rockets, nylon, nuclear reactor, xerox machine, scotch
tape, fax machine, computers, and the Internet--and the list goes on and on.

One
of the odd situations that has caused many people some difficulty, is the fact
that Joseph Smith, when translating through the Seer Stone, placed it in a his
hat and peered into it. Some people have mistakenly called it “the magic hat,”
but that was not the purpose—the hat was merely a shield against the light. Isn’t
it remarkable that 66 years before the first movie screen was viewed (at the
Berlin Wintergarten theater in 1895), and 98 years before the first TV (CRT)
screen showed an image, that someone knew it was necessary to place an image in
a darkened environment in which to see what was shown on it? Today, I still
can’t see the image on my Samsung S-4 2½” x 4¼“ screen in broad daylight. It
is interesting how it is the little things that add to the authenticity of the
Book of Mormon, and make its translation truly accurate, as well as those bigger
events surrounding its coming forth and being translated by the Spirit of the
Lord.